BIO
I was born at home in Via Dante 6, Latronico, in the mountains of the Basilicata region (Southern Italy). When I was seven years old, my parents moved to Rome, and so did I. In the following four decades, I played, studied, and lived in Rome, but I never felt at home once. I don’t want to talk about the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome, although I learned a lot from the technical point of view. Goodbye, thank you so much.
However, as a classical guitar student, I played a nylon 10-string guitar, so I should have known what to expect from the future.
But no.
I remember exactly the year, it was 1996 when I became curious about the steel string acoustic guitar. I started playing, improvising, and composing with the 6-steel guitar with my friend Luca Pagliani (who was, and still is, such an elegant classical guitarist). The first approaches to open and alternative tunings and the first experiments in amplification of the instrument were born with him.
In 1999, as a guitar duo, we recorded the album Overcrossing.
At this, point it was clear to me that the potential of the steel-string guitar was almost infinite. I had to, and wanted to, study it in depth, on my own.
I started composing solo songs, and as a young apprentice, I discovered the genius Michael Hedges, who renewed and re-invented the steel-string guitar like nobody else, both from the compositional and mechanical point of view. I loved Michael Hedges; I studied any song from his endless repertoire just by ear (no internet, no YouTube in the ’90s), trying to capture his spirit. I think it was a very innovative spirit at the service of music through the guitar. In 2003, I released my first solo album entitled Rag Tap Boom. In the following years, I released other albums: Circolare, Why Not?, Live DVD, From 1 to 8, and Deconstruction.
But I wasn’t always alone, though: Why Not? is a concert for acoustic guitar and string orchestra, and in 2010, I also recorded Guitar Republic in a trio with guitarists Sergio Altamura and Stefano Barone.
In 2015, I took a moment to think, and I realized that after Deconstruction, my exploration of the “normal” acoustic guitar was over.
But my curiosity was not over, though. A curiosity constantly fueled by a compositional imagination that made me hear in my head other sounds, other counterpoints, other harmonic interactions always coming from the guitar, but perhaps with more strings, in a new form, morphologically new.
I started again by modifying an old guitar of mine in collaboration with the luthier Davide Serracini. We added strings towards the high register, then towards the low register, and then we added some weird objects producing percussive and harmonic sounds. It took almost two years before the 19-string Lab-Guit was born (6 strings + 5 basses + 8 high-pitched), as well as the new album Village Life (2017), with compositions designed and written for this rich instrument, but also inspired by my new life in a small town.
Oh yes, I had finally moved to somewhere else out of the hell of Rome.
A conquer, indeed.
I spent the whole year 2018 recording and cataloging material. I was around recording everything: people, bells, breaking glasses, water, indistinct and distinct voices, cars running, rustles, and noises. Once recorded, I cataloged all these sound fragments, divided into various durations. I edited some of them, leaving others unedited, to build a small library of sounds (not so small, at last).
Then, I used all the recorded material as elements and instruments to compose new music. The result of the work was a list of medium-long compositions, organized following the simple rule of counterpoint, that is, something against something else, but with a particular aesthetic order: mine.
AGEinC, Hypothesis, Lux, Five W are the compositions for Suoni da Altrove (Sounds from Elsewhere). “Elsewhere” is related to the guitar, which does not exist in this world made of sounds coming from anything else. Sounds that are intelligible and familiar in real life but that are treated and transformed into elements of an orchestra in the music composition.
During the same year, I started playing with my friend Antonio Monti (semi-modular synth). We live performed and recorded Continuum, a work for Lab-Guit, semi-modular Synth, and video art by Emanuele Di Giacomo.
In 2020, I stopped again, but this time, like any other of us.
I find myself confined at home with a life of distance and media madness. Viruses that are not only biological creep in everywhere and separate us. I have with me the Lab-Guit, a library of sounds, and the experience of Continuum. But I am alone, so I can’t do anything but start studying. I think of an Expanded Guitar Suite and create it. I use some of the sounds from my library, set up the Lab with a hexaphonic pickup that drives some of those sounds, write new material, and try to manage and
play everything by myself. Having time, a lot of time, I find a way to do it
and I do it.
20-22 Concert for Expanded Guitar is then released.
I kept on experimenting by recording Birds, Small Movements, Tribal Tech, and Bells: four pieces for a 17-string electric guitar. They are improvisations and timbral explorations.
As a total neophyte of the electric guitar, I could verify that multiple pickups create a field of forces that are adjustable to a certain extent between them.
The interaction is no longer just between the sounds – it takes place on a deeper, almost metaphysical level.
Electricity is a sonic subsurface; magnetic interactions create aerial synergies, and the notes, the 12 notes known to us, are just details or perhaps the line of light between the known and the unknown.
I have opened my gate, a space-time-sound door from which I enter and exit. While I walk in the gardens of my imagination, I think of Conversation (2024), a dialogue between an electric guitar played by Tommaso Alfonsi and the Lab-Guit played by myself.
This is my story, as I see it now. But if you need a proper bio and press kit, click here
MEDIA
He employes a dazzling blend of slapping, tapping, strumming, altered tunings and harmonics, combined with classical phrasing and a focus on distinct and addictive melodies
Guitar Player